Sunshine and Shadows (21 page)

The cold fluorescent lights in the waiting room of the veterinarian's office showed no mercy; they illuminated the anguish in Jay's eyes.

"How long has Hildy been in there?" Jay asked impatiently.

Lisa glanced at her watch. "Thirty minutes, more or less," she said, shifting uncomfortably on the hard seat.

"It seems like hours."

Lisa reached for his hand. "Surely Hildy will be all right."

Jay expelled a long sigh. "With her health problems, I'm not too optimistic. Maybe I shouldn't have taken her out for a walk tonight. She wasn't eager to go anywhere."

"She looked better by the time we got her to the vet's," Lisa said encouragingly. "I'm sure of it."

"She licked my hand when I helped the doctor lift her onto the table. I thought that showed some of her old spirit." Jay leaned forward in his chair, frowning and staring at the floor.

They must have waited another half hour or so before the door to the waiting room opened. They both looked up, trying to read Dr. Stith's expression. The vet, a round, ruddy man with a kindly light in his eyes, rested a heavy hand on Jay's shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Jay," he said. "Hildy's gone. I did all I could."

Jay stared at him for one long, black moment before burying his face in his hands.

Lisa slid an arm around Jay's shoulders and bent her head close to his.

"I'm all right," Jay said quietly after a moment. He stood up.

"Like I said, Jay, I tried. Her old heart gave out, that's all," the vet said.

"Hildy was a good friend," Jay said, half to himself.

"Sometimes the best thing to do when you've been together as long as you and Hildy is to get another dog right away," said the vet.

"I'll think about it," Jay said vaguely, but Lisa knew that at that point, all Jay wanted was to get out of there.

They stepped out into a sharp-edged wind cutting suddenly around the corner of the building. Jay shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and they walked silently to his car. Once inside Jay sat with his hands resting on the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. It wasn't until Lisa's eyes adjusted to the dim lights in the parking lot that she realized that tears were streaming down his face.

Without a word, she turned to him and gathered him into her arms. He lowered his forehead to her shoulder, and she stroked his hair. He made no sound, but she felt his hot tears through the thin fabric of her turtleneck.

After a few moments, she pulled a tissue out of her pocket and handed it to him.

"How am I going to get along without Hildy? She's been my best friend, the only one who's stood by me through—well, through a lot of things." Jay's eyes were dry, but his expression was bleak.

"It isn't easy to lose a pet," she said. How well she remembered when her own dog died; she'd hardly eaten for a week.

"Losing Hildy is like a death in the family," he said, his voice sounding hoarse and strained. He dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, and Lisa's heart ached for him.

"I don't want to be alone," he said heavily. "Can you come to my place for a while?"

Connie was with Adele; they seemed to be hitting it off. There was no reason why Lisa shouldn't be with Jay.

"I'd like that," she said.

Jay started the engine and backed the car out of its slot. "Did you know that I found Hildy when she was a puppy? That she was abandoned behind the used car lot where I worked when I was in high school?" he said.

"It's hard to imagine Hildy when she was small."

"I loved her from the beginning. Sometimes I felt that she was the only friend I had." In the aftermath of the accident when he was seventeen, Jay's buddies denied that they'd asked him to buy more beer. His mother acted as though she wished he'd never been born, and his aunts had whispered about him behind his back.

He'd been desolate when he'd had to leave Hildy behind when he went to the University of Florida. After his freshman year there, he'd lived in an off-campus apartment and had been able to bring Hildy to join him. That was when he'd finally begun to pull himself out of his depression over the accident.

He didn't talk about any of that; this didn't seem like the right time. He drove directly to his town house, but when they stood in Jay's darkened living room, the place seemed empty and unnaturally quiet without Hildy.

After switching on a light, Lisa went into the kitchen and, without asking, poured Jay a glass of iced tea. She came out and handed it to him.

"Do you feel like eating anything?" she asked.

He shook his head and sipped the tea. "I feel exhausted," he said.

"Let's lie down for a while," she said, leading him into his bedroom.

He felt blurry-eyed and overwhelmed with grief. He hoped that Lisa wouldn't want to make love, which was a fair measure of how upset he was. He sat on the edge of the bed, noting in the mirror over the dresser that he looked as awful as he felt. His eyelids were swollen and red, and his feet felt like two lead weights.

Lisa bent down and untied his shoes as she would have untied a child's. She slipped them off, then tugged his socks off after them.

"Lie back," she said in a soft voice, and he was only too glad to follow her instructions. He stared up into the darkness.
Hildy,
he thought.
Hildy is dead.

Lisa lay down beside him and curved her small body around his. It fit in all the right places, and he rested a hand over hers where it nestled on his chest. It was a comfort, such a comfort, having her there. His eyes drifted reluctantly closed, he slipped into a state of half consciousness and must have slept after that, because he lost all sense of time and place.

When he woke up, at first he didn't recognize the solid warmth nestled against his right side, but after a few seconds, he realized that it was Lisa. Then he remembered—Hildy was gone.

"Jay?" Lisa said, her voice a mere whisper in the darkness.

For an answer he rolled over on his side and drew her close.

"I'm glad you're here," he said.

Her lips were soft upon his, and tentative, and gentle. At first he held back, feeling inept, thinking that on this night, he could not be interested in making love. Her lips persisted in their ministrations, sweetly seeking, opening to his like a spring flower to the dew. He felt himself responding, much to his surprise, and after a few minutes the world went away.

It was so good to hold her, to feel her compact body pressed close to his. He couldn't feel happy on this of all nights, but he felt a glimmer of pleasure blossoming in the far regions of his consciousness. She ran her fingers up his arm, along his neck, across his lips. He closed his eyes, swirled down and into the feelings, swam up and slid his leg across her body, drawing her even closer with the firm pressure of his thigh.

Certainly this way of making love wasn't filled with a sense of overwhelming passion; this was something else.

This was nurturing, and comfort, and succor. It was a gift.

He was awash in gratitude; it felt strange to be kissing Lisa with any feeling other than unbridled lust. But as her hands began to move more purposefully across his body, his feelings evolved into something else. He rolled over, taking charge, thinking how kind she was, how sweet, and how lucky he was to have found her.

His hand reached up and found her breast. Her nipple felt like a small, hard berry beneath his tongue. Slowly he slid his hand under her shirt.

She said, "Wait," and shimmied out of her clothes with a fluid motion that he found unbelievably titillating. When he stroked open her thighs he realized with surprise how ready she was. Her desire for him excited him even more. Her hands worked feverishly at the buttons on his shirt, and her fingernails scraped his skin as she tried to find the zipper of his pants.

Then he was free of his clothes, the cool air a balm, and his legs were entwined with hers, and she was staring up at him, her eyes glazed with a kind of luminescent wonder. For a moment he hovered over her, taking in her face flushed with love, her breath coming in bursts, thinking that never had he been so mesmerized by a woman, and then he plunged into her again and again until she begged for release.

She arched beneath him, her body in perfect tune with his, and his hands adjusted beneath her hips to urge her on. He would have stopped again, but he was incapable of it. She was a fire in his veins, pulsing, convulsing until he couldn't bear it any longer.

Her whole body clenched around his, her damp skin melded with his, and then he found her seeking mouth and drank from its sweetness until they fell apart, weak and sated and gasping for breath.

Afterward, they lay quietly in each other's arms, half sleeping, half awake, stirring occasionally to kiss and from time to time touching each other with fitting reverence.

She slept, stirring only when Jay got up and went into the kitchen. When she heard him rustling quietly, she got up and put on his bathrobe. She paused at the entrance to the kitchen and waited for him to turn and greet her, but he was preoccupied with the teakettle. He was wearing nothing, and the dim hood light over the stove illuminated the ripple of the muscles in his back, the indentation of his waist, the contours below. Her heart overflowed with love for him and with gratitude for the happiness he had brought into her life.

She padded silently up behind him, opened the robe and wrapped it around him. He leaned into her for a moment, perfectly still, then turned within the confines of her embrace, breasts brushing against back against arm against chest.

"Oh, Lisa, my dearest love, how did I ever live without you?" he whispered in her ear, and his hands reached around and lifted her to him, his arousal evident. She wound her legs around him, wanting more, feeling him hot against her, floating feather-light in his arms. The robe fell away, leaving them skin to skin, breath to breath, and then he was inside her again, his mouth moist against her cheek.

He gasped with pleasure, shuddered, and she felt her own body tremble and convulse in ecstasy. Her tears were wet against his neck as the keening of the teakettle began. It whistled for a full two minutes before he impatiently reached behind him and shoved it from the burner.

They stood trembling in each other's arms until Jay picked up the fallen robe and slowly and deliberately draped it around her shoulders.

Lisa lapped the robe in front and retied the belt, still shaken by the suddenness of their lovemaking. She had always wanted a relationship that encompassed the entire love spectrum—the right man for her would be father, mother, child, friend and an I-like-you-even-when-you're-being-a-bitch kind of lover. The one thing she had left out was passion, and now she couldn't imagine how she had overlooked such an important ingredient in the relationship.

"I don't suppose you're in the mood for a cup of tea," Jay said, and at the comical expression on his face, she broke into laughter and so did he.

He caught her around the waist in a loose embrace. "Well," he said, "if you don't want a cup of tea, the only other thing I have to offer you is a marriage proposal."

She thought she hadn't heard him correctly. "What?" she said.

"Marry me, Lisa. I can't go on like this, sneaking moments away from Adele, keeping our feelings a secret from the nuns at the mission, living apart. Marry me."

She
had
heard him correctly. She covered her mouth with her hand, gazing up at him in disbelief. She saw only his kind, gentle face, his eyes alight with amusement.

"This isn't a simple fling, Lisa. We're crazy in love with each other, and there's no point in denying it," he said.

"You sound—you sound as though you're arguing your case before a jury," she whispered.

He laughed. "Do I win my case?" he said.

"You're not joking? You're serious?" she said, scarcely daring to believe it.

He kissed the tip of her nose. "Completely serious," he assured her.

She threw her arms around his neck. "Yes! Yes, yes, yes!" she cried.

He picked her up and whirled her around. "You mean it? You'll really marry me?" He'd asked her on impulse; he hadn't expected her to reply in kind. He'd thought that women needed time to think such things over.

But she nodded, her cheeks red, her eyes bright.

And he laughed with happiness and swung her around again until she was dizzy with love and excitement.

"When?" he asked. "When will we get married?" He wanted it to be soon, the sooner the better, before she could change her mind, before his past intruded.

She thought for a moment, her eyes dancing. "Well, we'll have to reserve the church," she said. "And we'll want to choose bridesmaids and groomsmen, and I'll have to order a cake. And there's the matter of picking a china pattern, and crystal, and I already have my mother's sterling silver, but I'll need a dress, and it has to be the most beautiful dress in the world, and—"

"What about my work? Is there any way a busy law practice can survive such a wedding?" he asked doubtfully.

"I don't know about the law practice, but school at the mission will be over the last week in May."

"You haven't mentioned a ring. I want to buy you one that you'll like. No—make that two, an engagement and a wedding ring. Shall we go together to pick them out?" he said, pleased that she looked so happy.